FFrom discovering her unconscious son with a ligature on his head to the lengthy but ultimately unsuccessful legal battle to keep him from being disconnected from life support, Archie Battersbee’s mother has experienced anguish that is hard to imagine.
That pain has now been compounded by the recent discovery that Archie was bullied online in the months before his catastrophic brain injury on April 7 last year, he told The Guardian.
Hollie Dance, 47, said the threatening WhatsApp messages directed at her son were released as part of the disclosure process ahead of next week’s inquest into the 12-year-old’s death on August 6.
Dance still believes that what happened to Archie was probably the result of copying something online or participating in the “blackout challenge”. But she said learning about the harassing messages was even more devastating because of the relentless abuse the family had received since the start of the court battle.
“I couldn’t read too much because I was crying a lot, it wasn’t in a good way,” Dance said of the messages to Archie. “They were threatening to go to his house, knives were mentioned.
“It was a shock to me, it’s absolutely heartbreaking, especially since we’ve been trolled so much since April, which again is online bullying. There are two family members who have attempted suicide because of trolling.
“So to think that my little boy had been trolled before this and we had no idea is absolutely heartbreaking.”
Sources close to Archie’s family told The Guardian that the voice and text messages on WhatsApp continued for months and also contained calls for him to commit suicide.
The abuse targeting the family continues and family members have amassed nearly 20,000 screenshots to date that are being evaluated by lawyers and police, Dance said. As an example, she sent one received the day after the Guardian interview that he had a picture of Archie in his hospital bed superimposed on a picture of someone leaning over and smiling with the caption: “Do you think he’s dead?”
Dance said family and friends posted their addresses, while signs were posted telling people not to use the dog-walking business of Archie’s brother’s girlfriend, Ella Carter. Struggling back tears, she added: “They’ve even trolled some of Archie’s school friends: ‘Ha ha, your friend died,’ things like that. He is so evil.
“I can’t see how you wake up in the morning and you just want to start upsetting someone or wrecking someone’s life. We are not asking for this prominence, it is my little son who has lost his life”.
Dance said Archie never spoke to her about the messages she received and because they largely stopped before the fatal incident, she doesn’t believe they were related to him. She said her son was happy, looking forward to his first MMA (mixed martial arts fight), enthusiastically choosing her ring walk song, Hypnotize by Notorious BIG, which would be played in her place. her funeral.
“I think Archie would have taken his own life? Definitely not,” she says. But she still wants the senders of the threatening messages (their names were redacted in the transcripts she saw) to be investigated by the police.
The abuse directed at Archie, her enduring belief that online content may have played a role in his death, as well as the virulence directed at the family, make Dance keen for the investigation to address the issue of online safety. , which is already a hot topic given online security. Bill and Molly Russell’s investigation.
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Dance said: “I don’t think a 12-year-old kid suddenly starts tying knots around his head out of the blue. He has seen it somewhere or has been told about it ”.
In a pre-inquest review, Essex Chief Coroner Lincoln Brookes, citing a police report, said there was “no evidence” that Archie was participating in a “blackout challenge”. Dance, however, was willing to point out that that didn’t mean he wasn’t doing it; it is known that he viewed TikTok on the day of his death, but details of what he viewed are unrecoverable.
“We cannot see and we will never know what he saw,” he said. “It cannot be ruled out that she has done an online challenge.”
Dance said just talking about the challenges online had raised awareness. “I know from the thousands of lovely messages I’ve received that parents sat down with their children and checked those children’s social media and so on, so I know we’ve saved lives by raising awareness,” she said.
But he added that speaking out about the challenges online had also led to abuse. “It should never have been about me and my family and friends,” she said. “It should have been about Archie and raising awareness so it doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
Steven Horsley of Simpson Millar Solicitors, who is representing Dance in the investigation, said: “No child should be exposed to the kind of violent, threatening and abusive messages that were directed at Archie. Hollie, who has been through a lot already, is understandably shaken by the discovery that she was the target of such hateful bullying and hopes that appropriate action will be taken. It’s just one of several issues that she hopes will be addressed in next week’s investigation.”
